According to a recent post from Spectrum Corporation (“Unified Contact Center Reporting”), on a daily basis, “call centers and agents exceed their thresholds and the manager and the agents are made aware of the threshold violations.”

Now we know you’re a busy manager, you don’t have time to explore each KPI threshold violation. Heck, if you tried to do that you wouldn’t have time for the rest of your job. But wouldn’t it be great to get a summary report of the threshold violations? Then you’d have a tool showing exactly where the call center can improve.

That’s the beauty of summary reports, they boil down the thousands of lines of statistics into simple, easy to read and understand reports that you, the busy manager, can then use to manage the call center and make the changes that improve productivity, without having to spend all the time tracking down all the violations yourself.

Spectrum offers call center reporting software and contact center wallboards, designed, in the words of company officials, to “improve call center performance by reviewing critical KPI's and acting on the variances from your goals. Spectrum captures data from multiple data sources and builds unique reports specifically for your contact center. These reports can be published as Web Based Reports, to LCD Screens, LED Wallboards, Desktops and Dashboards, Email and Smart Phones.”

Call center outsourcing provider Sitel recently detailed a case study of their products, where a provider of consumer-direct travel services for the leisure and business traveler partnered with Sitel to help its “millions of customers” plan and purchase vacations either online or by phone.

The challenges they were dealing with are common to call center outsourcing providers working in the travel business including seasonal sales and call volume. In this particular case, there were serious call sales spikes in the first two months, doubling the normal call volume.

Obviously what the client needed was an approach from the vendor using flexible operations, including the ability to scale and adapt quickly to changing volumes, one that left the client capable of rolling out new sales programs within a 48-hour time frame, and offering a tiered service strategy.

In call center outsourcing news, Sitel’s Don Berryman, general manager of the Americas, gave a recent interview where he discussed nearshore locations, expansion plans, the ideal employee, plus how to build a good team, according to the industry journal Nearshore Americas.

Obviously this is of interest to those involved in call center outsourcing, since Latin America is an increasingly attractive area for the industry.

When assessing a country for call center outsourcing, Berryman said, “The single-most important element is the employable workforce. That they are smart and we will be able to have long-lasting relationships with them. We assess the infrastructure, stability of government, the ease to get in and out of the country.”

He noted that they can train employees for the job, but they look to hire people who “think well, handle client situations, work on computers, have good typing, have good comprehension skills, or a certain skill set like technical abilities.”

A recent white paper titled “Increasing the use of Speech in IVR Applications” produced by Interactive Digital does a good job addressing that topic.

As the paper notes, “telephone self-service in general is one of the few technologies that is strongly disliked by the user community. This is largely because the bulk of the implementations have been done so poorly.”

Indeed -- it only takes a few experiences with badly-done IVR -- “Press 17 for...” -- to turn somebody off to the whole concept and simply press “0” for the operator as soon as the menu starts.

It still remains wildly popular among customer service providers, however, primarily for the eyebrow-raising cost savings which are quite difficult to find anywhere else. As the paper notes, the projected CAGR for this market for 2010 - 2015 is 7.3 percent, with the outsourced sector leading the charge: “Virtually every enterprise has installed some form of telephone self-service.”

A well-designed voice application takes into account the fact that the customer may be calling from a noisy background, or that they simply do not speak clearly enough. A good Voice User Interface designs around this, determining the best input modality for a given dialogue interaction point.